We’d love your feedback on onboarding (especially if you’re new!) 

• How did you find your onboarding experience overall?  
  • Frustrating to say the least.   Also, stressful with not really knowing if things are working.  Are payments being made?  Cleaners being notified?  Messages going out?  No one to verify and lots of missed things and tweaks in after two weeks.  
• Was anything unclear, confusing, or frustrating in your first moments using Hospitable?
  • Yes, yes and yes.  Payments being made with VRBO bookings vs Airbnb.  Unpaid payments and how we are notified, booking alterations and how we process them. 
• Did you get stuck at any point? If so, where?  Yes.  Often.
• What’s something you wish had been explained or guided earlier on?  I wish we had a live person to walk us through it without the cost.
  (Something you had to figure out yourself or dig through help docs for, but could have been much simpler if included in onboarding).  Maybe more FAQ’s.  I will say, “Smarty” is very good and helped a lot.  But still doesn’t replace a human.

• How did you find your onboarding experience overall?  We paid for someone to guide us through it. Otherwise there is no way we could have figured out how to do the setup for messaging, how to connect to airbnb and vrbo…..nearly everything. Seems like having a guide without paying extra should be included.
•  
• Was anything unclear, confusing, or frustrating in your first moments using Hospitable? how to set the pricing was very confusing.  There was no explanation for what a base price is.  We adjusted prices often at the beginning trying to find a fit and we suddenly found our listing disconnected. We were told later it was because we changed prices too much. We had no idea that would be a thing.
•  
• Did you get stuck at any point? If so, where? Often - Smarty became my best friend and thank goodness for that because I needed just simple questions answered trying to learn this system. Digging through piles of instructional digital files or FAQs would have been way too time consuming, But when we do need a human they tend to be across the globe so they only answer in the middle of our night so we never get a back and forth ability to ask questions and really get them answered in an explanatory fashion.
•  
• What’s something you wish had been explained or guided earlier on? We signed up for the host plan and paid for a full year.  Later we discovered that we needed the higher plan to utilize the door code automation and being able to share that with our guests.  When we offered to upgrade we were told NO.  Once you pay for a full year, you are stuck with that plan. I think much later someone reached out to us offering to change it, but by that time we had decided to not pay more just to get the door codes. I think that should be included in the host plan - it’s a pretty basic offering that airbnb provides but hospitable blocks.
  (Something you had to figure out yourself or dig through help docs for, but could have been much simpler if included in onboarding)

​@Jon Floyd  ​@32feed  Thanks so much to both of you for taking the time to share this, really appreciate it!

This is incredibly helpful as we think about how to improve onboarding further, especially around making things clearer early on and building more confidence that everything is set up and working as expected.

Also great to hear Smarty was able to help so much, especially while our support team took a bit longer to get back to you.

We’ll make sure all of this is shared with the team as we continue improving the experience.
 

This is scary. I just signed up last week. I had one onboarding call and it was great, but these commets make me concernd. The money is spent, but I don’t want to waste my time as well.

A few quick questions:

• How did you find your onboarding experience overall?
  
  What onboarding experience? It didn’t exist. The new “Set up and grow” just points to confusing setup pages. This would useful if it had about 50 steps for all the best practices for the given business type ex:  solo STR host vs prop manager with client-owners. 
   
• Was anything unclear, confusing, or frustrating in your first moments using Hospitable?
  
  Yes, yes, and yes from the first moment through to now. I’m struggling to figure out how much I actually owe my property management clients or they owe me from past months. 
   
• Did you get stuck at any point? If so, where?
  
  I've made 5 different Reservation Commission settings and none of them, I think, are what my clients and I intended them to be. This is in part because there is no “best practice” guidance, only mysterious options to choose from followed by trial and error and lots of questions posed to Smarty, the okay Hospitable AI that is much faster than human support, or better from ChatGPT/Claude. 
  
  I’ve requested a version of the Reservation Commission settings that is client-owner readable plus a same statement to should the client-owners what to expect:
  https://feedback.hospitable.com/p/printable-commission-agreement-settings-and-sample-owner-statement
   
• What’s something you wish had been explained or guided earlier on?
  (Something you had to figure out yourself or dig through help docs for, but could have been much simpler if included in onboarding)
  
  - How to onboard a new client-owner
  - How Transactions work because Business vs Property transactions are very different ideas and Reimbursement category transactions are different from all the other categories, I think, 
  - Reservation Commission settings
  -  Primary, Secondary, and Teammates account -- this has settled down recently
   

If you’re an existing user:

• Have you checked out the new “Set up & grow” section?
  • Did anything feel missing, confusing, or particularly helpful?
    
    This needs to be a lot more developed without assuming we know best practices or jargon ex: Owner Statement (prop mgr pays client-owner) vs Owner Invoice (client-owner pays prop mgr). Maybe a glossary is needed?  How about Set up & Grow is an AI navigated chatbot that asks me my business type, STR experience, self-own vs prop mgr, et al., identifies what practices are on and off Hospitable (ex: separate bank accounts for paying contractors vs paying owner-client), and only moves forward through set up when what is to be done is clearly understood by the user. That’s what I would have highly valued and given the state of gen + agentic AI, what I expect.
    
    Frankly, if Airbnb supported MCP, I would seriously consider a Claude AI agent +  Mercury.com banking custom prop mgr solution as I reckon it would be less confusing and error prone for me to understand, navigate, and incrementally develop. I don’t really want to do that because I shouldn’t have to do that because all I want are best practices well-supported that cover 95% of my needs and the many others like me. 
    
    Thanks for asking the questions!
    
    Warmly, 
    Rob

Thanks all for jumping in here, really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

​@hostelowner If you have any specific concerns or feel something isn’t matching what was expected, definitely reach out to us directly — we’d be glad to take a closer look with you.

Regarding Direct, we do charge a service fee on bookings (which comes with a number of benefits) — apologies if that wasn’t made clear earlier. You can find more details here:
https://help.hospitable.com/en/articles/5845339-all-about-direct-bookings 

​@cecilia Totally understand how reading through this could feel concerning — if anything feels unclear as you’re getting set up, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Our team is always happy to help walk through things and answer any questions along the way.

​@Rob Lord Really appreciate the level of detail you’ve shared here, this is incredibly valuable. I’ll make sure this is shared with the team, including the Mogul team directly for the points related to Mogul features.